In an emergency or like incident, public safety (PS) personnel, such as police officers, firefighters, paramedics, emergency medical service technicians, disaster relief workers, military rescue personnel, and like first responders, are typically dispatched to an incident scene to respond to remedy the emergency. These PS personnel typically utilize PS communication devices, both handheld and vehicle-portable, while working in the field. PS communication devices include, for example, land mobile radios (LMRs), such as handheld radios and/or vehicular radios, along with accessories, such as microphones, speakers, earpieces, headsets, and the like, to support wireless, two-way, voice and data communications. These primary, mission-critical PS devices and the infrastructure to support their operation are typically operated as part of a private, secure, and protected, proprietary PS network governed by a PS agency, e.g., a local government or department.
As advantageous as the known PS networks have been, there are circumstances where a more expedited and effective resolution of the incident is needed. Thus, it is known for PS personnel from different agencies to arrive at the incident scene and not all be able to communicate with one another with their respective PS devices. For example, police officers may not be able to communicate with firefighters, and vice versa, and none of them might be able to communicate with paramedics or other first responders. Even PS personnel from the same agency may not all be able to communicate with one another. For example, in a fire emergency, firefighters might be grouped in different response teams, e.g., ladder, search-and-rescue, etc., and these different teams may not be in mutual communication. This lack of communication is due to many factors, such as different PS devices, different PS device manufacturers, different software on the PS devices, different encryption keys, complex user interfaces, lack of channel information, lack of a configuration computer, lack of programming skills, etc. This lack of communication prevents all the PS personnel from grasping the full nature of the incident, and prevents efficient cooperation with one another to resolve the incident.
Accordingly, there is a need for reliably and rapidly enabling the PS devices at an incident scene to communicate with one another in a common talk group configuration to efficiently resolve the incident.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and locations of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of embodiments of the present invention.
The method and system components have been represented where appropriate by conventional symbols in the drawings, showing only those specific details that are pertinent to understanding the embodiments of the present invention so as not to obscure the disclosure with details that will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.